A Personal Retrospective on "GreedFall"

Spiders' Sleeper Hit 5 Years Later

Sep 04, 2024

GreedFall on Steam — Credit: Spiders, 2019

For the month of September, to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the release of Spiders’ colonial-era fantasy roleplaying game and celebrate the first stages of its prequel, all posts will be themed after the 2019 video game GreedFall. This title quickly became one of my all-time favorite games, and not just for its masterful use of Celtic culture and language. In today’s post, I will be going over my personal history with GreedFall and how it has influenced my approach to writing, storytelling, worldbuilding, and research.

This post has spoilers to the plot of GreedFall, so if you would rather experience this game fresh then I highly recommend picking it up for yourself on console or PC and seeing where the story takes you!

GreedFall’s release and my subsequent purchase of it came at a very interesting time in my life. The first trailers released over the spring/summer of 2019, my junior year of undergrad, and it caught my attention due to the setting—a colonial-era fantasy with Celtic-inspired elements. Since graduating high school, I didn’t feel like I had the time to game for hours on end, instead choosing to focus hard on college. I kept GreedFall in mind for when it released in September of 2019, but only watched a few gameplay reviews before turning my attention back to academics. I actually picked up the game during a Steam Summer Sale in 2020, so it goes without saying that at that point I had a lot of time on my hands for gaming of all sorts. Having been out of practice when it came to video games I ran into some frustrating moments during combat, but for some reason I never once considered refunding the game; something about it had me hooked.

Before I say much more about my experience, I’ll give a brief rundown of GreedFall for readers who aren’t familiar with it. The game takes place in a secondary1 fantasy world set in time period equivalent to the West’s colonial era (16th-17th centuries). Players begin on the continent of Gacane2 in the city of Sérène where they assume the role of De Sardet, the legate of the in-game faction known as the Congregation of Merchants. De Sardet is cousin to Constantin D’Orsay, a bon vivant and the appointed governor of the colonial city New Sérène. Gacane’s civilizations have been afflicted by a plague known as the Malichor, each faction believing in it having a different origin, but most agree that a potential cure for it lies on the island of Tír Fradí (“anglicized” as Teer Fradee). The island, however, is inhabited by a native population that is technologically inferior to the colonists from Gacane (whom they call renaígse), but most possess a magical bond with the land itself that grants them spell-like abilities and slowly transforms them into powerful, inhuman creatures. Through a myriad of choices, players must decide how they wish to navigate De Sardet’s story, choosing how to deal with the various factions vying for control over the island, uncover the hidden history of Teer Fradee, and decide the fates of the old and new world.

In recent years, I’ve had a loose “test” whenever it comes to video games. If a video game has me hooked enough to forget my bedtime and get me to play until 4am then I say it’s a winner in my book. This test is called my “4am test” for obvious reasons. In the past 5 years only four games have passed this test for me: Kingdoms of Amalur Re-Reckoning, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Elden Ring, and GreedFall. I remember taking a break from the game soon after purchasing it, then booting it back up on the night of July 4th, 2020. I remember staying up until the sky turned blue and the birds started singing. In addition to the simple dopamine rush of each completed quest and acquisition of cool items, I wanted to see how the story of my De Sardet played out.

The faction I associated the most with for my first playthrough was the Teer Fradee Natives3 who are divided into different tribes across the island, each with their own agendas and philosophies. This choice was largely due to the number of Celtic influences I saw in their culture and language—the latter of which is mostly based off Proto-Celtic reconstructions.4 Additionally, one of the big revelations about the character of De Sardet is that they are actually a Native who was adopted by the former legate of the Merchant Congregation, and I wanted to lean into that background for my player character. This is, however, one of the points where I formulated one of my few criticisms about the game—I had hoped, after this discovery, the game would enable players to explore De Sardet’s heritage and potentially unlock a new skill tree based on the Natives’ magic system. Unfortunately, beyond some story and roleplaying implications, there is little else that GreedFall capitalizes on with De Sardet’s Native origins. After playing one of Spiders’ previous titles, Bound By Flame, I figured they could have incorporated some mechanic similar to the demon-possession of Bound By Flame where players could decide whether to lean into their character’s origin or remain loyal to the culture in which they were raised. Hopefully, GreedFall 2 will have some kind of system in place to explore the powers of Native magic-users.

When it came to the story and how I approached it, I got so caught up with trying to explore other quests and furthering my characters’ relationship with the Natives that I made a rather dire mistake. At the midpoint of the game’s second act the Coin Guard, one of the major factions, stages a coup against the other colonists on Teer Fradee. The Coin Guard is essentially an independent group of mercenaries and bodyguards, one of the NPC companions, Kurt, is part of this faction and is De Sardet’s personal guard and martial trainer. Like in games that inspired GreedFall, such as BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age, the NPC companions all have personal questlines, the outcomes of which may determine their loyalty to the player character. In my haste to progress the Natives’ quests, I completely neglected to do Kurt’s, which cost my De Sardet his loyalty and life as he sided with the Coin Guard, attempting to kill Constantin and seize control of New Sérène. Immediately after the fight with Kurt, I considered reloading one of my previous saves to do his personal quest. I ultimately decided against it in order to live with the consequences of the my choices. Previously, I had gotten comfortable with the ability to reload saves if I made a poor decision or didn’t quite hit the right dialogue option or if one of my NPC companions died. Mainstream games I had played like Skyrim didn’t have all that many consequences when it came to things like that as they were designed to allow players the “best” experience possible. My choice in forgoing Kurt’s quest eventually led to the total takeover of one colonial city on Teer Fradee and the loss of a few questlines I didn’t even realize existed until after I finished the game.

When I started grad school, I took another break from GreedFall (and gaming all together) so I could focus on the more intense workload and preparation for my thesis. I picked it back up again during the spring semester of my first year when I chose to write a term paper for a Middle Welsh literature course on comparisons I noticed between the game and the primary texts we studied. In addition to using my university’s extensive collection of Celtic written resources, I reached out personally to Spiders, Antoine Henri, and Jehanne Rousseau the creative director of Spiders to get some information on the Celtic connections in GreedFall. The answers I received clarified for me that the designers did not have one singular analogue in mind when it came to the Native culture of Teer Fradee, or even the rest of the world and story. After these interactions, I can say that Spiders is one of the few game design studios that retains the spirit of artistry and exploration; they wanted to incorporate a “universal” philosophy into GreedFall by taking from many different inspirations rather than just one. While I did find most of what I looked for when it came to comparing the Native culture to Medieval Welsh literature, I also came away with the realization that I as a student of a particular field was noticing patterns that not even the game developers might have considered and likely had their own interpretations of.

Having an opportunity to directly speak with the people who made one of my favorite pieces of media, even just to get a few answers for a research paper, was a very inspiring experience that partially led to the creation of Senchas Claideb. Although GreedFall is not marketed as or specifically intended to be a “Celtic-inspired” game, as a scholar of Celtic Studies, I wanted to find and review how it repurposed and utilized elements from the literature, history, and culture of Celtic-speaking peoples. As I said above, GreedFall has little discourse in the way of popular and academic circles, and the same can be said for the bulk of 21st century Celtic-inspired media that isn’t Outlander. Part of why I wanted to create Senchas Claideb is to help promote games and other stories that drew upon these forgotten or misunderstood cultures. Adapting any real world influences into a fantasy story without trivializing the source material is difficult, but there are some, like GreedFall, that can get it right even if they aren’t trying to make an analogue.

In the midst of my research, I also reached out to the small official GreedFall Discord server inquiring if the fans knew of any pseudo-scholarly research done on the game. Shortly thereafter, I received an invitation to a fan-run GreedFall server, which was a bit livelier than the official one. In addition to finding some supplemental resources, I found some respite between writing assignments by engaging with light chats on the server, sharing my experiences with the game, and even getting back into something I thought I had abandoned following high school—fan fiction. With all my other academic obligations, I found myself in a sort of drought when it came to writing original fiction. While I still had ideas for my own stories, the act of writing fan fiction required less intense thought. I mostly wrote jottings or vignettes of my character’s experience throughout the game, “filling in the blanks” to personalize my De Sardet’s story. GreedFall, by itself, provides enough information for the casual player to make sense of everything that’s going on and take it as is. At the same time, it also instilled the desire in me and the other fans on the server to want more from the game in the best of ways; we wanted to know more about the world, characters, lore, and everything in between. It was thanks to fan fiction that I got answers I wanted for myself and a few generous breaks between academic writing.

By the time I was gearing up to write my essay, I still had not finished the game so I needed to get cracking on that. This gave me the excuse I needed to get in gaming sessions as homework, since I could claim I was conducting “anthropological research” on the Teer Fradeeans. I had no idea how my De Sardet’s story would end since the world was left in somewhat dire straits thanks to me breezing past Kurt’s loyalty mission. My actions seemed to exacerbate certain things, like uncovering the truth about the major religious faction’s god, killing the Natives’ High King and selecting a violent, new successor, and having missed out on one faction’s questline entirely (thanks to the Coin Guard coup). By the time I reached the point of no return and was locked into finishing the game without the chance to complete other missions, I was on edge to a degree that I had not felt for any other game I had played up to that point. I worried for the safety of my NPC companions, the few factions I could muster the support of (by the end only two joined my character’s cause—the Natives and the Nauts, a sailor-based faction), and the fate of the island my character had been taken from at birth. In the end, I’m glad I chose not to reload any saves, stuck with the choices I made, and completed what missions I could. I wouldn’t say I got the “good” ending since my choice of High King ended up getting all the colonists pushed out of Teer Fradee, but it was bittersweet, a victory that by all means should not have happened. All my NPC companions (excepting Kurt) survived and the factions that had supported my character remained friendly to him. It left me with some speculative ideas for a few fan fiction stories, but at the same time, I felt satisfied with having my own story to tell about a game I finished beginning to end with (almost) no walkthroughs.

I think one of the reasons I got the ending I did was because I forced myself to complete a character’s loyalty mission I originally thought I would not do. One of the NPC companions, Aphra, is a researcher for the Bridge Alliance faction, an Ottoman Empire-inspired group with heavy emphasis on science. I reasoned that my character resisted entertaining Aphra’s quest was due to the Bridge Alliance’s almost eugenicist viewpoint on the Natives. However, since her quest delved into the Natives’ rituals and she wasn’t as extremist as the rest of her faction, I decided it would at least be informative for my research paper. In doing so, I secured her loyalty along with the rest of the party. Aside from this, I’m not entirely sure what other factors might have lead to my De Sardet’s victory. This anecdote just goes to show how Spiders might have even slipped some messages about forgiveness or giving people a chance can lead to the “good” ending.

I keep meaning to start a second playthrough of GreedFall, I have ideas for characters and mechanical builds to explore all the options this game has, but time constraints and other games I’m wrapped up in have taken up the bulk of my schedule. My first playthrough, however, left me with a similar feeling for the way people who grew up with the older CRPGs reminisce about the stories they made through play. To me, though it came out when I was removed from my childhood, GreedFall is one of those video games that I can happily say gave me special memories. I only hope that GreedFall 2 can give a new, exciting experience in the same world.

Thanks for reading this week’s post! If you’ve played GreedFall, share some of your favorite moments from the game in the comments!

A Personal Retrospective on "GreedFall"

Spiders' Sleeper Hit 5 Years Later

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